Mini Writings #3

Hey, guys! I started this series over a year ago, but I recently revived it and y'all seemed to really enjoy my inarticulate, first-draft ramblings. So, sans further ado, here are some more!

Everybody burns with a little bit of fire.It is in our anger, in our passion, in our love and our hate and our everything-in-between. It is in our adrenaline, electrifying intoxicating racing through through our blood and into our fingertips.Humans romanticize fire. We long to control it; we dream of it consuming us and us consuming it. We dream of being tragic figures, martyrs and magicians, done and undone by flame. We desire to rise to the greatest heights and fall to the greatest depths, up to heaven and down to hell, in whirlwinds of fire. But it is the nature of fire to consume all it touches - including us. Especially us. We try to grab it and trap it, and it grabs and traps us. Flesh melts off our blood, blood boils off our bones, bones disintegrate into ash. We are destroyed, no glory to be found; there is no crown of flames licking our hair and no scepter of fire burning our hand.For it's never paid, and it never will, to tangle with fire.

They say,

“No guts, no glory!”

But it’s hard to find the guts for greatness

When all that remains of my glory

Is three fallen feathers

Crusty with blood and tainted with smoke

Fallen to my feet and littered around like

A mocking kind of tribute

A cruel kind of joke

A dark kind of theme

To the person I once was,

The guts I once had,

And the ultimate glory

Of which I once dreamed.

Cold stings her skin and clings to her bones. Frost crunches beneath her feet and digs into her back as Anakova whips behind the ruins of a crumbling archway, her bright red cloak like a splotch of blood in the grey landscape. Her hair sticks to her forehead and lips, skin sweaty from adrenaline even in this frozen hell. She's long past worn out; her legs are burning noodles on the edge of collapse. But she manages to keep her panting under control. She must. The hunters are near.

She hears their feet now, lightly crunching the sticks littering the ground as they close in all around her. She hears their voices, murmurs slowly separating into distinct words. "Look" and "blood" and "here" and "there". Rough voices and satiny, high and low, but all after Anakova. Damnation, damnation, damnation for her, for the priestess who grew sick of serving her god and ran away. But before she ran away, she stole one of the greatest weapons of all. She doesn't want to use it. Once expended, it can never be regained. But the voices are getting closer and closer and the footsteps louder and louder. What choice does she have?

Trembling and stiff with cold, Anakova reaches down to a metal container at her belt. Red mist floats inside. She dips an arrow in, nocks it to her bow, and says a prayer.

Ignite.

God's fire ripples up her arrow and leaps onto her bow, brighter and hotter than the sun. Her hair singes; her eyes burn. She can barely hold it for the heat, the heat!

Blindly, she turns and fires.

The last things she sees before collapsing onto a bed of crumbling stone are fire consuming the trees, the hunters, and even the sky; clouds writhe in pain as the fire eats them alive.

They say only the good die young.

They say the good are too pure, too naive, too gullible and fragile and breakable.

They say that in this world, being good is a decided disadvantage. They say the good will not survive - they will be culled out; they will die and be buried and we will walk on our bones as we climb to heights they never imagined.

But I would like to propose a change, an amendment, an addendum.

I think somewhere, in the centuries and centuries this saying has been passed through until it made its way down to us, the tellers made a mistake. They subtracted one letter and added another, and in doing so, they permanently altered the saying’s meaning.

They say only the good die young.

But I say it’s only the gods.

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Let's chat! Which writing was your favorite? What do you imagine happening in those pictures? Comment below, and remember that you are all very beautiful pickles. <3